Take a close look at the ships in the future battle. Daniels tells us that this is happening 400 years from Archer's time, i.e. 2554. Yet one of the ships we see flying past the window is a Prometheus class first seen in Voyager's "Message in a Bottle", set in 2374. So Starfleet is using ship designs that are 180 years old? I guess the war must have taken a pretty heavy toll. Worse still, just as Daniels is telling Archer what the name of the battle is, we see the Dauntless from Voyager's "Hope and Fear" fly past! The Dauntless, remember, was a fake Starfleet ship built by Arturis. I guess Starfleet must be so desperate that they're using ships that don't even exist!

Great Moment :

Plenty to pick from. The eye candy battle between the Enterprise and the Xindi was beautiful - I previously complained about the effects used for the alien bubbly space. I'm beginning to think they were saving up for this one! That said, my personal favourite moment was Archer winding up the Xindi reptilian by talking about how tiny dinosaur brains were and how much he likes turtle soup.

Body Count :

Hard to say. We see three Enterprise crewmembers blown out into space through a hull breach, but you have to assume that at least a few others would be killed in that battle. Reed gets clobbered with a big metal beam, and at least one guy in engineering is very badly burned.

Factoid :

This episode establishes that the Enterprise-J will exist as of 2554. That means that the average gap between the E-E and the E-J will be around 35 years. It also states that Klingons will be Federation members as of this time, as will the Xindi.

Plotline

Enterprise arrives at Azati Prime to find the site of the weapon's construction is surrpounded by an impenetrable defence system. Archer sends the captured Xindi Insectoid shuttle in for reconnaissance, and the weapon is duly located - but only a suicide run in the shuttle can ensure the destruction of the device, a mission Archer decides to take on himself. To complicate matters, Daniels turns up and informs Archer that sacrificing himself on this mission not only won't save Humanity, but may in fact destroy the future of the entire galaxy...

Analysis

Well, this episode is quite a ride! We've suspected how the Xindi arc is going to end up for a couple of episodes now, so no great surprises there - the sphere builders have set the Xindi against the Humans to get us out of the way so that they can conquer the galaxy for themselves. But the episode plays it well, leading to probably their most exciting climax ever with Archer in captivity and Enterprise on the edge of destruction. It's obvious how the ship will be saved, but the tension of the ending is only slightly lessened by that.

Characterwise, the episode sends T'Pol veering away from Trip and back towards Archer - I wish they would make their minds up about this one, because it's annoying to see her going one way one week and the other way an episode or two later.